Have you ever felt "trapped"? - <AUTHOR>

Right now I'm feeling a little bit "trapped" mentally and emotionally. I have a very demanding full time job with a company whose values don't match mine. I have several interesting ideas for a startup that could generate some revenue on the side in hopes that it may lead to me being able to quit my job (or at least find a less demanding one), but I seem to be in this viscious cycle of never being able to muster up the motivation to actually start working on my ideas. After I'm done a gruelling day at work and have dealt with all of the other responsibilities in my life (I'm married and have a mortgage, but no kids), I'm just too exhausted to get to work on any of my "side" ideas.<p>Have any of you ever been in a similar situation? Did you find a workable solution? Is it just a matter of wanting it bad enough to work through your exhaustion and give your ideas the time they deserve? <comment><USER2> I have been. I was working full time at a brokerage. It was very draining. I worked on my project for two years, every night, sometimes just for fifteen minutes at a time.

You need to just get started. 15 minutes every day.

You are going to have to learn how to be more efficient elsewhere. You're going to have to be ruthlessly efficient with your projects, too. Beware engineering meanders. [An entire world of learning goes here. Too long to write. Maybe someday I should. You'll have to pick it up too.]

I find that when I'm too tired to work, it's a temporary feeling - if you power through it, and do JUST 15 minutes of work, you can do another 15, and then another hour, and then go pass out.

You can do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> You're exhausted and showing signs of burning out.

I'd recommend taking some vacation time to do nothing. If you can't do that, then you need to find another job that is less stressful to you.

Maybe even consider taking a job that you would ordinarily consider "boring", so that you have the energy to work on your ideas.

With your current situation, all you can really do is stress yourself out even more.

<comment><USER4> Yup! Burn-out Zone ! Take some time out, chill, assess what you want out of life. Some questions to consider :

"Demanding full time job": who is doing the demanding, your boss? you? co- workers? How can you deflect or reduce the demands?

"A company whose values don't match mine": why are you stil working there? Life's too short to be stuck in self-invalidation.

Like you, I couldn't get enough energy together after work to productively work on my side project. So I downsized and quit. The side project has turned into full-time PhD research and a consulting business. Haven't regretted taking the leap. For me, happiness is doing what I'm passionate and interested in. The big mortgage was just a trap to keep me working for The Man.

<comment><USER5> Do you have a family to support?

<comment><USER4> YES! We are a team!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been there, it took a long to force myself to leave the situation.

A wise man said about overly restrictive religous regulations, "Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath", meaning the rules of rest on Sunday and etc are meant to make our lives better, we were not created to suffer for the glorification of some set of rules.

A job is supposed to make your life better -- steady income, you can have more stuff, etc. If it is taking up too much time, requires you to live where you don't want to (my case), then the job is not doing it's job.

A house and mortgage are supposed to make your life better. You live in a nicer place, you can observe your equity and wealth increasing month by month, you have more freedom to change your house or take up hobbies that you might not do in a rented house. If the mortgage requires you work too much to enjoy the house, the mortgage isn't doing it's job.

I'm not advising making any rash decisions like going full hippy or something, but in a more gradual and moderate way, you can feel out your boss about working four days a week; look at your life and cut some spending, ditching the house and renting if that is what gives greater freedom and security; etc.

Careers and houses aren't worth that much. They don't hang around that long or increase in value that much in the long run. If you look at the number of times the average American moves or switches careers, any helathy cat or dog will outlive your current career and house. They just aren't worth giving up life long dreams or health for. Now your marriage, that could be different.

Try suggesting to your boss that you will commit to being in the office 10 hours a day, but need every Friday off. When he shoots it down, wait a week and then suggest trying it only one week a month.

Also, take your ideas and break them up into extremely small tasks, that take an hour or less. If you can look down a TODO list and see something quickly achievable, that can get you going even when you are exhausted.

</comment><comment><USER7> After one of our contractors suddenly quit, left the country, and dramatically changed his lifestyle, my old manager started to joke that in the future he'll only ever hire people with a mortgage.

What do you value the most?

Slightly more practical advice - this depends entirely on your situation, but what about consulting? If you can transition to that and still make enough to cover the mortgage, you should have much more control over your schedule.

Along the same lines - I once worked with someone who was only working 4 days a week. Why? Simply because he asked. It didn't affect his role on the team, or his effectiveness, he just wasn't there one day a week. If you're willing to take a 20% pay cut, it's an option to consider.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm in the exact same situation right now.

I have two projects that are actually making money(!) but not enough for my wife and I to live off of. I would really like to find a programmer to work with, but I can't afford that either. Or rather, I'm not sure what other options I have so I can afford somebody.

I know there needs be a leap of faith somewhere, but I don't how high or even where to jump.

<comment><USER5> "but I don't how high or even where to jump."

I think this stems from not wanting to put your family in an unnecessary and risky situation, and having to reconcile whether your career choices are made for your benefit or for your whole family.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow... my situation exactly, except I have kids but no mortgage.

Any advice would be appreciated.</comment>


Ask HN: How to find problems worth solving? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN!
I will be free for the next few weeks, and I want to build an MVP to a) gain some experience, b) have a cool project on my resume, and c) maybe make some money.
I know how to make a website, how to design, how to do marketing, how to do conversion optimization, etc. My only issue is... I don't know what to build. And I definitely don't want to build a useless product.
So my question is simple: any advice on how to find problems worth solving? Thanks! <comment><USER2> 1\. Pick a niche or industry you want to work with.

2\. Get in touch with owners/managers in your chosen area.

3\. Take them to lunch and discuss their business. Watch their face and when they show you a pain point, try to pinpoint the cause.

4\. You should discover more than a few problems they would spend money to have solved if you talk to enough of them.

5\. Follow up with an email thanking them for their time and mention again how you have been giving some thought to a particular pain point. Try to find an article, software package, etc that attempts to solve their pain point and send them the link.

6\. Build a true MVP (should be embarrassing, yet offer value to them), and follow-up with an email. Tell them you have been thinking more about their problem and wrote up a quick dirty app that might help them. Offer to demo it for them. While demoing discuss how much their pain costs their business.

7\. Iterate based on their collective feedback.

8\. Based on the discussion about pain costs, come up with a value-based price for your solution.

9\. Refine your MVP, follow-up with another demo. Sell them a subscription to your solution. It may still be rough, but you should be able to demonstrate value and savings compared to their pain costs. CLOSE THE DEAL.

10\. Follow-up

11\. Iterate

12\. Follow-up

13\. Iterate

14\. Follow-up

15\. Iterate

16...Rinse... Repeat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that looks like a good way to find a profitable startup idea. But here I'm just looking for a small side project idea, and I'd like to find it quickly. So taking random people to lunch seems a bit overkill.

<comment><USER3> Do it anyway.

You learn far far more about an industry talking to someone immersed in it than any other way.

If you just want to spend the next few weeks coding, there are any number of github projects. If you want a side project - trust me, it will run and run for months if not years.

Get your linkedin page up, and find an admin at a local hospital, a CEO at a local charity. Take them to lunch.

go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People often look for pain points in an area they like.

However the pain points that you actually should solve are the ones that drive you crazy, that make you woof in annoyance when they just don't work. Stuff that you know you 'should' do but find a way to put it off. People tend to stay away from these areas because - well they hate them!

Yet that is where the solutions are needed the most.

Some pain points that really frustrate me :-

* Getting an e-mail with an attachment that I have to print out, fill in, sign, scan back to my e-mail and then attach back to the receipient. That is just far too many steps. I don't think the likes of 'Sign Now' cut it because that relies on the sender sending it in that format. It needs to be a solution for the recipient.

* Setting up mailing lists.

* Formatting & nice templates for e-books.

* Following up enquiries x number of days after I sent a quote.

* Tracking the ROI from different advertising methods (adwords, print advertising, facebook etc)

* Tracking all the issues & bugs I fix at work to prove my productivity.

Don't pick what you WANT to work on. Pick something that is currently a pain in the ass and feel the benefit of your own solution.

<comment><USER5> >Tracking all the issues & bugs I fix at work to prove my productivity.

I really like this idea, so frustrating that fogbugz doesn't have a "all the issues I modified today" filter (that I can find).

As an aside, there's room for improvement in this area but check out our (HelloSign) extension at [http://hellosign.com/gmail](http://hellosign.com/gmail), simplifies your first bullet point significantly.

<comment><USER4> Wow, HelloSign looks spot on for what I was looking for, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1) Solve a problem that YOU face or someone you know faces/has 2) Start small and think big 3) Saw this list - [https://medium.com/design- startups/49acac7c3405](https://medium.com/design-startups/49acac7c3405) lots of stuff popped up but saw "A bookmarklet to help people manage their job search — the job search process sucks. Let people use a bookmarklet to track jobs they like, which they've applied to, and the rest" and was like.. WOW - NO one does this. It's super simple and the process sucks for all of us, but could be a simple way to build out a MVP and generate $

Just a thought - Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> It has to be more than just "worth solving". I can think in a few ideas "worth solving" just like that. It has to be good enough so people pay for it.

A lot of people would like to have X feature, X website, X software. Would they pay for it? Ask that question. For what would you pay for right now?

For example: I am starting to selling goods. I'd like a place where I put all my good purchases from ebay, alliexpress or wherever, and I can track it, see when it will arrive, how much stock I have left, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Talk to people. People love to complain, especially about their jobs. They'll complain about their pain points. Listen for one that seems interesting.

</comment><comment><USER9> Take a look at this pg essay: [http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Trawl Firespotting. There's a lot of crazy on there, but in amongst it all are some really good ideas: [http://firespotting.com/news](http://firespotting.com/news)

</comment><comment><USER11> Ask a lot of people. Ask them about their daily frustrations. Ask them to share what they think the big problems of the world are. Post on forums online, go into chat rooms, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can you help us build out this prototype (www.insp-i.com)? You could even join us as tech co-founder.</comment>


Turing Tarpit - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit <comment><USER2> My favorite Turing tarpit is FRACTRAN, devised by John Conway. It's flabbergasting that it is actually Turing complete, but it is.

A FRACTRAN program is a list of fractions, rational numbers. You input an integer and then you find the first fraction that gives you an integer when multiplied by your input. That process is repeated with the new, multiplied number until there is no fraction that produces an integer when multiplied.

Conway wrote a program that generates primes, there's others that mathematical sequences, but my favorite is just the addition program:

        3/2

Given an input 2^x * 3^y, it will stop at 3^(x+y), which adds x and y together.

<comment><USER3> For some reason this makes me imagine an alternate history sci-fi universe where Pythagoras (famous for his love of fractions) invents FRACTRAN. Then Archimedes builds a mechanical computer to execute those programs, and one of the successors of Alexander The Great puts the computer to use in warfare and conquers the world. Science is accelerated so that nuclear physics are invented by the time Jesus is born... Surely there's some kind of plot waiting there :)

<comment><USER4> "My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this article is missing a description of the phenomenon "accidentially turing-complete". Configurations langues or DSLs that over the time evolved and somehow got turing complete. I suspect these are the most common turing tarpits. And it's a horrible smell.

<comment><USER6> That's kind of an interesting one: consider two configuration languages. The first is not turing complete and can be considered a good language. The second is an identical copy of the first, but includes the ability to have recursive definitions which ends up making it turing complete.

Is the second language really worse than the first? They can both be used the same way, but the second one can allow for some shortcuts in configuration by abusing turing completeness.

I'd guess the arguments would be: the 2nd language is better, it can create an identical configuration in less lines. Alternatively: the 1st language is better as should allow for easier parsing and is simpler to verify for correctness.

<comment><USER7> > the 2nd language is better, it can create an identical configuration in less > lines.

A simple macro or syntax sugar could save you the same lines. A good language will give you a good, terse syntax for representing common configurations, and enough flexibility for clearly denoting the uncommon ones. If your configuration is particularly obscure, it _should_ need more lines to express.

It is not worth sacrificing verifiable correctness to induce this kind of gain when there are better ways of doing it.

<comment><USER8> Be careful, 'lest your macro language itself turn Turing-complete.

> _It is not worth sacrificing verifiable correctness to induce this kind of > gain when there are better ways of doing it._

It's also important to remember it's not always worth sacrificing power to gain verifiable correctness. Not every class of problems needs it.

"Freedom for security", something something. ;).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like it. Is there a term for the opposite situation? Where you're operating in a declarative environment, what you want to do _should_ be possible, everything similar to the thing you want to do _is_ possible, but your particular use case is excluded due to lack of foresight/manpower/understanding by the authors?

(Obviously not entirely specific to non-Turing-complete environments but they tend to be the worst offenders and the hardest to work around for obvious reasons.)

<comment><USER10> Not an opposite situation, but avoidance of this issue (mostly related to management of state) is outlined in the fantastic paper 'Out of the Tarpit' \- which in my opinion every developer should read at least once.

[http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf](http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Funny enough I have been doing a deep dive on production rules and logic programming lately, facing up to why the technology has not caught on more than it has.

One thing I find is that novices are creating rule bases that form infinite loops and that the CS community has been paralyzed by the fear of infinite loops and poor scaling for particular reasoning chains.

Working with mainstream languages, however, I don't find infinite loops (or Turing's Halting Problem) to be all that relevant and the big reason is that the mainstream languages that people like to complain about already have structures built in that make infinite loops less likely to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's worth noting that, even if a language is a Turing Tarpit, it doesn't mean there's no value in it. For example, I think of Brainfuck as a brilliant language to introduce people to writing interpreters.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this link after seeing it in this [0] article condemning functional programming languages. While I don't necessarily agree that FPL's should be avoided, I was hoping some interesting discussion might emerge from it.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10566899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10566899)

<comment><USER13> That article was a fairly factless rant. To my mind, while there may be good reasons to avoid FPLs, that article doesn't present any. It reads like it was written by an angry non-technical co-founder, and its use of images was more appropriate to Buzzfeed than HN. There are certainly more businesses where an army of mediocre Java or PHP programmers are sufficient to keep a piece of software in a useful state than there are environments where you need FPLs, but blanket condemnation is not really worth the time it takes to read. Also, equating a $60k PHP dev and a $150k Haskell dev is likely to be a serious error. And of course, describing FPLs as Turing Tarpits is indefensible.

In other words, there's not much in that article to discuss.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough, thanks for your thoughtful analysis!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They can be entertaining, though, if you don't get enough of annoying coding hassles at work! To that end there's a miniature genre of programming puzzle games on the PC. I'd recommend Human Resource Machine, SpaceChem, and TIS-100 for starters.

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of something my voice teacher used to say to me in criticism of my flamboyant style of jazz improvisation, and it's my basic philosophy on interface design (of all kinds): "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

I also apply it to improvisation. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Designing and implemeting one of this languages is fun and useful to learn how a Turing machine works. I'm not really into PL design, but I guess this could be a good task to get started.

<comment><USER17> At university I had great fun creating a functional programming language that macro expanded to lambda calculus that was then "compiled" to various sets of combinators - I still find the fact that you can express recursive progams using Y purely in terms of two trivial function (S and K) to be one of the most surprising things in CS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I suspect any Lisp is a Turing tarpit.

<comment><USER19> > A Turing tarpit (or Turing tar-pit) is any programming language or computer > interface that allows for flexibility in function but is difficult to learn > and use because it offers little or no support for common tasks.

Which common task could you not perform with Lisp?And if you are stressing on the `Little or no support`,then thats true any of the lesser popular languages isn't it?</comment></comment>


How to make a game from scratch using Lua and Löve - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog/issues/30 <comment><USER2> This is an unpopular opinion, but I wish Lua had won against python. It integrates seamlessly with C and for an interpreted language it's super efficient. Rather than including every library under the sun in the standard lib, Lua is compact and the entire compiled binary is measured in kilobytes. You can read the Lua source code in C and comprehend a lot of it in a weekend.

Lua Rocks package manager includes basically every library you could want. Lua doesn't even include proper object oriented programming, but is so powerful you can add support for it quite easily, and is a good learning experience for aspiring Lua programmers.

Lua is a great language, I wish it was mentioned and compared against more popular languages like Python and JavaScript.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any insights on why Lua didn't win?

<comment><USER4> I'm not OP, but I couldn't get past the fact that arrays start at 1 rather than 0.

<comment><USER5> While many languages follow a 0-indexed convention, as you see here, not all do. Another couple of cases I run into are Postgres arrays, and switching between "first", "second", and "nth" in Clojure.

If it helps, you can think 0-indexed as referring to the offset, and 1-indexed as referring to the position. It's a shame to dismiss the entire language due to what one might argue is a minor aspect.

<comment><USER6> I would not call Clojure 1-indexed though because of 'first', it uses 0-indexing for list, vectors, and arrays.

<comment><USER5> To be clear, I'm not calling Clojure 1-indexed: I provided "nth" and "first" as examples of contrasting 0- and 1-based conventions; in this case within the same language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I looked at love for teaching school children. It looked great, except they unfortunately use some sexual names for many of the most common libraries (like anal and lube). Highly amusing I'm sure, but I'm afraid not safe for children!

<comment> loup-vaillant You don't have to give all the context to the children. And if they're not already old enough to understand what "anal" means, you can just say it's a butt joke (or maybe just leave them to their ignorant innocence, they can just believe it's a made up name for a time). If they _are_ old enough, I'm afraid avoiding the word is going to save them.

"Lube" is used in non-sexual context. You can escape the puritan "inappropriateness" by referring to mechanics.

Also, how about replacing all sexual names by something else? A little sed script should be enough, right?

<comment><USER7> In practice, modern teenagers are going to go to the love wiki to find libraries and documentation, that's the main place to find it. There is no point me giving them an incompatible variant, which won't let them take their programs home.

Also, it's easy to say "oh kids, just tell them it's a joke", but in today's society, that is the kind of thing which could easily get one fired. If just one library was named sexually, it would be easy to say "oh, you are misreading that", but the pattern is obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Aside, how does one archive/move/transform github issues? I like the low- friction aspect of blog posts as issues, but they aren't first class WRT git. The content is locked into the github ecosystem, not replicated/cloned/backedup.

Github wikis _can_ be cloned, [https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and- editing-wiki-pag...](https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki- pages-locally/)

But it doesn't look like github wiki pages can have issues/comments associated with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now I'm manually posting the markdown files on the repository when I'm done editing them [https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog/tree/master/posts](https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog/tree/master/posts) But it's not a good solution I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My first "real" game[0] was made in lua and love. It was a great experience and I loved the community (pun intended). Godot engine has got me now, but I always keep an eye on lua and love.

One thing that also made me laugh a lot (despite some people labeling it as unprofessional) is the funny love-related names people give to libraries. Stuff like: HUMP, Gspot, flUIds, Polygami, Swinger, Love Bone, etc. Such a funny community :D

[0] [http://www.bitoutsidethebox.com/autumn](http://www.bitoutsidethebox.com/autumn)

</comment><comment><USER10> As a long time "Lover" I was delighted when I discovered that repo long ago. I starred it and forgot about it. Nice to see you finished it.

I always wondered how to make an open source game but still sell it. This seems like a plausible way to do. Hope you have a decent income from it!

That said, Love is a really great framework and I always wish there was something like it for Go. While I like Lua, I prefer compiled languages and I think Go could be nice for games but it is still lacking in that domain.

edit:typos

<comment><USER11> You could try RayLib, it works really well with Golang.

[http://www.raylib.com/](http://www.raylib.com/)

[https://github.com/gen2brain/raylib-go](https://github.com/gen2brain/raylib- go)

<comment><USER10> Hey thanks for the comment. In fact I know raylib. I made some simple particle library in C for it.

I think raylib is really great. It is very comparable to Love in greatness :-) and I keep recommending it to people.

However the go bindings have one problem (all go bindings for game frameworks i know of have this problem): it is not so easy/impossible to leverage the build target capabilities of raylib. E.g. the web target will just not work at the moment and the mobile targets will also involve a lot of fiddling.

It is cool to play around with but if you really want to make a game and deploy it to many targets none of the current go "solutions" is great. Maybe "ebiten" is good in this regard but there are some other showstoppers for me (no shaders.. etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm trying to get in to game dev as a hobby and Love/Lua is great for someone who wants to make games, but would rather spend time writing code than learning something like Unity. Lua is simple and very easy to pick up, although I think the next time I touch Love and Lua I'll try out the OOP library the author mentions instead of rolling my own classes.

Other things on my list to try are Phaser for the easy cross platform distribution (it's JavaScript) and Godot, because although I enjoy coding little games "from scratch" I feel like I would be much more productive with the tools that Godot or Unity offer.

Here's my little game: [https://github.com/dj/dinojump](https://github.com/dj/dinojump)

<comment><USER13> I'm in a similar boat. No experience with Unity or game dev in general, ran through some tutorials but it seems really heavy for doing something simple. I coincidentally picked up Lua recently and found it a delight, and this framework looks right up my alley.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never looked into it before, but their basic game loop is flawed. It would work fine on Windows, but Linux and Mac have high resolution system timers and SDL_Delay(1) which is called underneath would really sleep 1ms (or maybe 2-3ms, but rarely more). This means that the game would run at 1000 fps and consume much more system resources than needed.

A much better approach would be to calculate how much extra time we have and then sleep that long (optionally minus 1ms to allow for that rare case where you get 2ms sleep). This can be #ifdef'd for non-Windows platforms only.

<comment><USER15> "This means that the game would run at 1000 fps and consume much more system resources than needed."

I don't really see why this would be a problem for a game which, while running, is generally the most important process for the end user anyway. Of course for services and such background tasks this would be intolerable.

<comment><USER16> You're right that it is often the most important thing - but not _always_. For example, people (myself included) often have a YouTube video playing in the background, which also consumes a lot of resources. Having both may start to cause problems.

Regardless it is a good thing to avoid over-computing. It helps those with lower powered computers or people on battery-powered machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am currently writing a little game using vanilla JS and HTML5 Canvas. I plan on porting it to other platforms once I have a version of the game that is sufficiently complete and that is fun to play.

I haven't thought much about what languages to use for the ports yet but maybe I will give Lua a try.

I want to target iOS first. Personally I am excited to port it to iOS but not so excited about Android because I want to try Swift and because I have an iPhone whereas my Android devices were all disappointing and I don't like Java.

According to [https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution](https://love2d.org/wiki/Game_Distribution) it is possible to target both iOS and Android with Lua + Löve. If it turns out to be comfortable to work with and sufficiently performant I would prefer using Lua and Löve to target both of iOS and Android instead of Swift and Java respectively.

Has anyone here had experience writing for iOS or Android with Lua + Löve? Did it work well both in terms of tooling and coding and performance of the finished game?

<comment><USER18> Haven't worked with Lua + Löve on Android yet, but Kotlin might be an alternative. Comparably convenient like Swift IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, this is fantastic and I just realized Github has topics. Anyone have recommendations of other really well done complete tutorials on [https://github.com/topics/tutorial](https://github.com/topics/tutorial) ?

</comment><comment><USER20> Does VS Code have a good enough Lua extension to be used for stuff like this?

<comment><USER21> It does. There are Lua and Love2D extensions. I use Atom when working with Love2D, however. The tooling there is better. BTW, there's a great short Love2D course on Udemy.

[https://www.udemy.com/lua-love/](https://www.udemy.com/lua-love/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are there any more tutorials like this on creating games?

<comment><USER23> It's not a tutorial, per se, but Game Programming Patterns is a free online book that explores common design patterns in game development: [http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/)

As a non-game developer, it's been one of the most invaluable resources I jump too when trying to optimize something.

<comment><USER24> I bought this book and finished it in a couple hours. It's fun to read and the examples are well-illustrated, but it doesn't go into very much depth on anything and its breadth isn't terribly wide either. I would say it's good for people who are learning programming in order to learn to make games, but people who are already programmers won't get much from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thanks for this. I've been thinking about sitting down and diving into Love recently and this should help save me a lot of time.

</comment><comment><USER26> Saw the title, and thought Scratch was [https://scratch.mit.edu](https://scratch.mit.edu) \-- a popular way for kids to learn programming basics.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice! I've had good experiences with love, I'll definitely check this out</comment>


Ask HN: Should I and how to start meditating? - <AUTHOR>

A significant amount of ycombinator users seem to participate in meditation and I've been interested in starting myself. However I do not know where to start my rsearch from (and what type of meditation to start with) as most of the information on the internet seems to be from alternative medicine websites, which I do not trust. Can anyone point me in the right direction regarding meditation from a scientific point of view? <comment><USER2> "Meditation For Dummies" is actually a good starting point.

I am not sure what you mean about a scientific point of view. Though, I come at it from a non-dogmatic point of view and am methodical about many things. I don't read scientific studies to tell me how to meditate. I mostly just meditate in the mornings before breakfast and read the occasional book on Buddhism/Zen/Etc.

For a simple start, I would buy a box of birthday candles and find something to hold them. They take 20 minutes to burn and are rewarding and attainable from the start. I use a scrap of wooden floor tile and cheap candles except dark blue ones that didn't work well. Melt the bottom of a candle and watch it burn to nothing. Don't leave it unattended. I sit cross legged on the floor but find something that works for you.

As the candle burns, count inhales from 1-10 without thinking about other things. This strengthens your ability to direct your thoughts. When you have had enough "exercise", turn inward and just ask "what am I feeling right now?". What's going on in your life and how do you feel about it? You can almost hear the vibrations in your breathing and heart beats and feel tension in your muscles. There may be things you don't admit to yourself normally. Over time, you being untangling these "balls of emotion" and find your understanding and honesty with yourself increases and maybe starts changing your approach to the world.

Anyway, Thich Nhat Hanh's "The Heart of Buddha's Teachings" is a tough but rewarding book. I also like reading Zen Koans daily from iPhone apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got started by reading Meditation in plain English: <http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html>

I thought it was a pretty good intro. Not a scientific approach but there are some research papers on meditation. Have not run across a book.

I am now beginning to read Zen mind beginners mind: [http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Shunryu- Suzuki/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Shunryu- Suzuki/dp/1590308492)

Only just started so can't comment. Seems more advanced but I have heard great things about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I bookmarked link to this study some time ago - [http://phys.org/news/2011-01-mindfulness-meditation-brain- we...](http://phys.org/news/2011-01-mindfulness-meditation-brain-weeks.html)

I've also read "the miracle of mindfulness" which was a pretty good read. You can find a pdf quickly if you know how to use google ;)

I would love to see some more scientific studies on how meditation affects one's brain. I'm not a big fan of all those "metaphysical" writings on meditation. I'd like to treat it more like a consciousness training.

<comment><USER5> +1 for the miracle of mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. Ive tried to read a couple of other books about Zen and meditation - but I think that book was the best. Ive written a short summary about it here including a video from a meditation session at Google: [http://blog.habrador.com/2012/06/whats-up-with- zen-part-2-th...](http://blog.habrador.com/2012/06/whats-up-with-zen- part-2-thich-nhat.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are many schools of thought on how learn meditation, ranging from "just sit!" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza) to very detailed instructions on posture, states of mind, etc. I thought the manual part of "Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond" was very well written. Another good one is "Turning the Mind into an Ally".

Good luck and remember to enjoy the journey!

</comment><comment><USER7> Alan Watts is a great resource on this subject, particularly in translating eastern philosophy for the western world. That is to say, he "sums it up" and puts into context the concepts of Tao/Zen Buddhism/etc, which would be tricky if analyzed based on English translation of the literature alone.

With regards to meditation, his 'How to Meditate' video is an excellent place to start: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4Qkgmm5qQM>

A good quote from that video: "The essence of the whole art is to feel, to experience what is, what happens, without saying anything to yourself about it."</comment>


Chillingo Acquired for $20 Million by Electronic Arts - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/10/20/angry-birds-electronic-arts/

<comment><USER2> Rovio is the maker of Angry Birds. They have _NOT_ been acquired.

Chillingo is the publisher of multiple iOS games. They were acquired.

Rovio is most likely worth much more than $20m at this point.

<comment><USER3> What is the relationship between "maker" and "publisher"?

<comment><USER4> The "maker" or "developer" is Rovio, which created the app. Chillingo published the app on the app store and was responsible for marketing. Rovio still owns the IP to angry birds (The angry birds franchise is likely worth more than 20 million on its own). The value of Chillingo likely comes from the fact that it published 2 #1 hits (Angry Birds and now Cut the Rope), meaning it has a brand name with iOS gamers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This title isn't exactly accurate - the publisher was bought, not the development studio. Chillingo has published nearly 100 games on the app store.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the difference between a 'maker' and a 'publisher'? Anyone else confused?

<comment><USER7> What's the difference between a book writer and a book publisher?

Same thing, except for games.

<comment><USER8> Um well let's see.

The book writer creates the book. For an iPhone App that's the same as the game developer/development studio. Ok, got that.

The book publisher physically creates the finished product and distributes it wholesale. That's totally different to the world of iPhone apps/phone apps. The _developer_ creates the finished product (the binary) not the publisher and there is no wholesale distribution, as you can only sell it through one place - the iTunes App Store.

So, your answer kind of makes no sense and doesn't move the conversation forward.

<comment><USER7> Excuse my terseness, I was responding to someone who seemed legitimately confused about the difference between game maker & publisher, I thought the analogy with books was sufficient to at least grasp the basics of the differences without being overwhelmed by specifics (and all of their exceptions).

In both cases the creator makes the primary product while the publisher packages that product in a format suitable for manufacturing or distribution, interfaces with the relevant distribution channels, handles revenue and all that, etc. The broad strokes are the same for books and for games even though the specifics are widely different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On a related note, does anyone have any details on the sort of deals Chillingo works out with developers? E.g. how much do you pay them and what do they actually do?

I know they've published a number of top 50 apps, but I'm curious as to what cost.

<comment><USER10> It's usually a revenue split of around 60-40 in favor of the developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Earlier I wondered where a multiplayer game like this (I know Worms, it is quite different) is. It would be fantastic round-based time-stealer. Pass the device around or even play by sms or over the net. It does not even have to be realtime. $$$ idea? :-)

</comment><comment><USER12> Here is the deal:

Rovio is still independent.

They used Chillingo as a publisher and thus they are obligated to pay Chillingo 50% of the profits for Angry Birds.

EA has purchased Chillingo and thus rights to 50% of Angry Birds's future profits.

<comment><USER13> 50% seems like an obscene amount to give someone just to promote an IPhone app. Especially when having the app featured on iTunes is the best promo you can get and that's Apple's call.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If other acquisitions are any indication, there will be only one or two Chillingo people remaining at EA in two years.

<comment><USER15> I would frame it more positively: "EA has a knack for talent retention when it comes to front-desk receptionists."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> angry birds shows the importance of branding.

essentially it's a crash the castle type of game which are a dime a dozen...but by branding themselves they managed to get the success they've got

<comment><USER17> And by creating an incredibly polished, good-looking, easy to use, accessible game. Every part of Angry Birds was clearly tested and iterated on until it was perfect.

Half Life 2 is just another first person shooter, they're a dime a dozen. Doesn't mean it was easy to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone else surprised? I'm not being sarcastic. Hasn't Angry Birds already made > $20 million? If not, isn't it close enough?

<comment><USER19> It's likely somewhere around 7-8 million, give or take. And, I have a feeling alot of that goes to Rovio, the developer of Angry Birds.

So, I guess EA's in-house "8lb. Gorilla" homegrown studio and mini-publisher for smartphones was stillborn, so they acquired one. Smart move. Chillingo has had a load of #1 app store hits from various developers; they seem to know how to pick 'em.</comment></comment>


Redis PSYNC2 bug post mortem - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/news/115 <comment><USER2> Thanks for all you do antirez!

</comment><comment><USER3> > the tests never try to mix PSYNC2 with replication of Lua scripts

This sort of testing gap is so hard to avoid. Any complex system has an inexhaustible number of potential feature interactions. It's very difficult at best to guess which combinations need to be tested, and often difficult to even write a test which exercises a particular combination.

What techniques do people use to ensure test coverage of complex cross-feature interactions like this? Two things I emphasize:

* Emphasize integration tests, and try to use multiple features in each test. This can help drive out interaction problems; the downside is that these tests are harder to write and (especially) maintain. It can also be difficult to exercise specific code paths.

* Write randomized tests, that exercise as many features as possible. The challenge here is identifying failures. "The program didn't assert or crash" is often a good start. A gold standard is to run a simple reference implementation alongside your real implementation, and compare the output... but that's not always possible.

<comment><USER4> If you mean randomized tests as in adding random choices to your tests, I think that is a very bad idea (that I have been bitten by before).

You NEED tests to behave consistently. If you run the tests twice against the same code, it needs to return the same result. Otherwise, how will you know you have fixed the issue the tests caught?

Speaking from experience, soon after you introduce randomness to tests, you will start to get intermittent test failures. When that happens, people will start to ignore failing tests because, 'hey, this is probably just a random failure'

<comment><USER5> Seeded RNG.

<comment><USER4> So not really random, then? What is the point of adding an RNG if it is going to output the same values every time?

<comment><USER6> Because then the testing stimulus is not hard coded anymore, but generated. It's then trivial to run longer sequences, or tweak the test.

In hardware design, where reliability is key (making a chip costs multiple millions and 6 months time), there is only random testing (with seed for reproducibility), not "that bunch of case that the person testing thought of that day"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're all human – appreciate the write-up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is Redis a one-man show? (plus contributors)

I am still using memcached, but consider Redis in future.

I am looking for a Redis-based high-performance message-queue that can be filled from Nodejs and consumed with PHP. Basically a high-performance message-queue that doesn't need dozens of servers to start with.

<comment> why-el Try [https://github.com/antirez/disque](https://github.com/antirez/disque). Written by the same guy behind Redis.

> Is Redis a one-man show? (plus contributors)

Well, yes, started by one man, and he continues to lead it, with many contributions from the community.

Update: I fixed the wrong URL.

<comment><USER9> > Try [https://github.com/resque/resque](https://github.com/resque/resque). > Written by the same people behind Redis.

Huh? I don't think it is, Redis is by antirez .. [https://github.com/resque/resque/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/resque/resque/graphs/contributors)

<comment> why-el Oh damn, I meant [https://github.com/antirez/disque](https://github.com/antirez/disque), not resque. Apologies.

<comment><USER10> FWIW, it appears the current plan is to not continue it as a standalone app but turn it into a redis module: [https://gist.github.com/antirez/a3787d538eec3db381a41654e214...](https://gist.github.com/antirez/a3787d538eec3db381a41654e214b31d)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Introduction to Stock & Options for the Tech Entrepreneur or Startup Employee - <AUTHOR> http://ospflor63.stanford.edu/upload/An-Introduction-to-Stock-Options-for-the-Tech-Entrepreneur-or-Startup-Employee.pdf <comment><USER2> I would also recommend the book _Consider Your Options_ at <http://www.fairmark.com/books/consider.htm> . It costs <$25 and will take a few hours to read, but can save you from making very expensive mistakes.

I bought this book back in the early days of Google to make sure I was doing everything right. It's boring but clear and helpful, which is about as much as you can expect from a book about stock options.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to check this book out. But I've always had one nagging question about vesting I haven't found a good answer for.

Say you have a bunch of shares vesting over 2-4 years.

Is it possible (or realistic) to make an arrangement that in the event of an acquisition or liquidity event that your stock becomes full vested? Even if its been less than the full vesting period?

<comment><USER4> Acceleration usually comes as single-trigger or double-trigger.

Single-trigger is what you are talking about: when all of your options vest immediately upon acquisition. It could be argued that this is unfair to those that have worked their full time to earn their full options grant. Usually, in this arrangement, a certain percentage of your shares are subject to the trigger (so, 25% vest immediately, for example). I think it would be unusual for 100% of your options to vest immediately upon acquisition: what if you were acquired a month after you joined?

The second type is double-trigger. Let's say that you have 75% of your options unvested in an acquisition, and you have 3 years remaining to vest at the new company. If they fire you, you lose the rest of your options. Double-trigger acceleration is where your options vest immediately if you are not fired "for cause". That means that, as long as you are not being grossly negligent at your job, the new company can't screw you out of your unvested options by laying you off.

The one thing to remember here, is that a lot of this is subject to your leverage over the company and the leverage the company has with its new acquirer. All of these terms are subject to renegotiation in an acquisition, and anything could change at any time -- look at what happened with Zynga.

Consider it a gentleman's agreement, for the most part. Good people will honor it, shitty people might try to screw you. As with anything, you should only do business with those you trust.

And finally, the absolute best way to make sure you get the full value of your options (as an employee or a founder) is to always make sure you are indispensable to the company. A company who needs you can't screw you.

(final note: IANAL, this is my understanding of how things work)

<comment><USER5> So in the case where you don't have accelerated vesting, what happens to unvested options in an acquisition? Do they get converted to options in the equivalent dollar amount of stock in the acquiring company on the same vesting schedule? (Obviously subject to negotiation, YMMV etc etc...)

<comment><USER6> With an acquisition I went through, none of the unvested options (after acceleration) turned into anything (meaning those remaining shares were never issued/created). However the acquiring company put forth their own stock incentive plan in hopes of retaining employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Post-Enron, the government suddenly felt it was really important to have all options be priced by third parties, even tiny three-person private companies, so it's now a legal requirement that if the Board wants safe harbor from lawsuits, it must get a 409(a) valuation done every 12 months. These usually cost around $8000 and are done by the most unimaginably braindead accountants you can possibly imagine. Their job is to tell you a high price (say, 1/4 of Preferred) and your job, amusingly, is to explain to them why your company is Really On The Brink Of Absolute Annihilation so as to coax them into a 1/6 or so valuation, which then the Board will accept. This process is time and money you cannot afford, but the government mandates it._ (source: page 12 under "Pricing")

At the core of this issue was (and still is) how "deferred compensation" can be exploited by executives as golden parachutes. When execs can spread out their compensation over time, the tax treatment of the compensation can be minimized for the execs and maximized for the companies. Before 409a, the reverse was true. Whenever corporate profits are earned they're either re- invested or distributed -- only two ways to handle the money.

Before 409a, golden-parachute-type arrangements taxed execs when amounts were actually (or "constructively") received as income. This tax treatment made it favorable for employers to give deferred compensation as incentive -- lots of it. Makes sense: amass huge liability for work that was never actually done on profits that have not yet been earned. If you're an executive of General Motors, or on the board of any large company, this pre-Enron way was good for the manager getting deferred compensation, but bad for the company. Any future profits go to the executives FIRST (whether or not those execs are even at the company still!), and the short-term performance of the company and manager is what they want to focus on.

There has always been a huge battle between corporate profits and executive compensation. One of the best professors I had in grad school had done his doctoral on golden parachutes, and this is a pretty interesting area. Complicated, but interesting.

Unfortunately, we don't have any laws creating incentives for corps to give profits to the common shareholders (in this case, employees receiving vanilla stock options), just the laws that encourage companies and their (current and former) executives to engage in tug-of-war over the distribution of future profits. When this happens, very little of the value tends to trickle down to Joe Shareholder .

</comment><comment><USER8> Great article!

Does anyone have a link to a document that would detail the ways that you could get screwed over by a startup? Or by VCs? I know there are tricks that can be made via dilution, or something, but all I've heard are horror stories, but no actual mechanics of how it was done, and what you should look out for when looking at joining a startup.

<comment><USER9> > _Does anyone have a link to a document that would detail the ways that you > could get screwed over by a startup? Or by VCs?_

There's really no need, because it all falls under this category: You work really hard, and then they use one of the many powers of the board to screw you out of a payoff. I've seen punitive dilution, reverse splits plus new issuance, firing before vesting events.

If you haven't looked up variable-reward experiments, it's worth a gander because it bears a strong resemblence to startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Relevant former discussion (with some great poitns from Grellas) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2623182>

</comment><comment><USER11> This (extremely well-written) document has made the HN front page at least once before. I think this is a testament to how useful this information is for entrepreneurs. I didn't have time to read it in full last time, glad it's back again.

<comment><USER12> There's actually a couple of errors on the first two pages. Where can I submit errata?

<comment><USER13> Also, the author (myself) reads Hacker News, including this comment. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey there's something I'm a bit confused about. The text talks about how when you receive stock as an employee you pay income (gains) tax over them for which they might not have the cash. Does this also hold for other stock holders like the founders?

When the FMV has increased, do founders also have to pay taxes for their shares?

<comment><USER15> To avoid this, vesting founders would presumably file an 83b election within 30 days of receiving the shares (mentioned in the PDF.) Then, they only have to pay tax when they sell the shares. And if they held on to those shares for over one year, this would be a smaller, capital gains tax.

Described in more detail here: <http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup_004.html>

<comment><USER16> What is the definition of 'date of grant' in this sentence:

Procedurally, an 83(b) election must be made within 30 days of the date of grant.

Is it when the vesting schedule says you vest?

Is it when the vesting schedule says you vest, and the stock is physically sign over?

<comment><USER17> Well that just scared the crap out of me. Fortunately, the rest of the net believes that you have 30 days from the date of _purchase_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great guide overall – a couple of clarifications, though. The first sentence of the Ownership section seems to confuse 'authorized' with 'issued and outstanding' shares. The amount of shares authorized must be in your corporate charter and requires shareholder approval to change. From that pool of authorized, the board can then issue shares which then become the 'issued and outstanding' shares. If you add in the amount of shares that could be issued if all securities convertible into that class of stock were converted (e.g. convertible debt, options, warrants) then you have fully diluted issued and outstanding. Also, as someone pointed out, ISO vs. NSO has nothing to do with employee vs. advisor: ISO's are incentive plans/options that are designed to meet certain requirements in order to allow favorable tax treatment.

</comment><comment><USER19> A book that I also find interesting, and give great insights in venture capital, is the book wrote by Chris Dixon, <http://amzn.to/uQSXnb>. It's only 2,99 and give good and insightful advices for startups and venture capital.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here is the original Scribd doc: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An- Introduction-to-Stock-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An-Introduction- to-Stock-Options-for-the-Tech-Entrepreneur-or-Startup-Employee)

</comment><comment><USER21> one question - the doc has a very standard "I'm not a lawyer so go get a lawyer" which is understandable and appreciated. Could someone who is a lawyer read the document over and give a thumbs up/down or give their notes on it?

obviously their notes wouldn't be legally binding either, but it would be a step which would improve this already awesome guide.

<comment><USER13> The Third Edition (which I'm working on) includes feedback from Michael Sullivan of Pillsbury Winthrop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sometimes I feel it may be easier to build a profitable business and grow using debt than to safely raise VC.

<comment><USER23> Do you mean bank debt or VC-style hybrid debt?

No bank in their right mind would give millions of dollars to a "coder" with a "great" idea.

A bank (or any rational debt holder) has little interest in upside. Their interest is capital protection and repayment.

Debt is typically divided between "asset lends" and "cash-flow lends". You can get serious leverage with an asset lend, maybe 80% of equity, but that assumes you have assets (less debt) as colateral. So if you want $3m, you need at least $3m in equity.

As for cash flow lends, rational debt providers won't go anywhere near even 5 times for an unstable/unproven company. 5 times what? Usually some proprietary measure of earnings (EBIT, EBITDA, EBITDA-C, NPAT, cash flow, etc, adjusted for whatever the bank decides). So for $3m, you usually need $1m in cash-flow already. Even then, you have to deal with monthly or quarterly debt covenant reporting.

Most businesses who qualify for cash flow lends are relatively solid. That's because the covenants are restrictive (and especially frightening for an inconsistent business). A 5% drop in revenue can filter down to a serious drop in the proprietary cash-flow calculation and have the bank calling its capital the next day.

Compare that to a VC scenario. Imagine you've burnt through $3m, sales have dropped, then the bank calls the entire $3m loan. Maybe in the US that stuff flies, but in most responsible financial markets, that means you're toast for 5-7 years. You won't even get a mobile phone contract in some countries.

Of course there are business suited to traditional debt, but I can't imagine the typical HN reader would look for serious capital from credit institutions, unless of course they made serious money and they couldn't get VC for market size reasons.

<comment><USER22> I do not know what the technicalities are for bank debt, but it seems that VC money is easier to get, but has one million little hooks. With debt there aren't usually hooks. You pay a fixed interest rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This has a lot of really valuable information - thank you for sharing. I only entered the working world a few years ago and I wish I had read something like this before I had a job offering options so I wouldn't have been so clueless about how to look after my long term interests.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you're receiving NQSOs (non-qualified stock options) instead of ISOs, note that the document is entirely confused about them. They have nothing to do with advisors vs employees.

<comment><USER13> Not confused; it's just typical for advisors to get NSOs and employees to get ISOs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wow, this is so useful. Will get everyone to read it!

</comment><comment><USER27> Thanks for the article. I'm just going through the process of incorporating now and this is helping solidify what I've been learning.

</comment><comment><USER28> Shameless plug: I work at truequity (<http://www.truequity.com>) where we provide a subscription based product, for start-ups, to manage stocks & options. I think it really helps founders understand what happens to their company when investors come in.

</comment><comment><USER29> very useful thanks!</comment>


Show HN: I categorized 13000 books and built a recommendation engine for them - <AUTHOR> https://www.amos.app <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, this is Dom, the starter of Amos.

The plan is definitely more than just books. We want to be the best recommendation engine for online learning resources - podcasts, videos, courses, stack overflow questions... Check out [https://github.com/amosapp/amos/issues/2](https://github.com/amosapp/amos/issues/2) for the current roadmap

When I say we - I'm actually working on the project alone. And I'm looking for cofounders! Lemme know if you'd like to work on this project too!

I'm organizing a launch party this evening. All you need is a Zoom client. Come join us at this link [https://zoom.us/j/381352856](https://zoom.us/j/381352856)! (BYOB ;)

Finally, let me say the whole project (code & content) is in the public domain. Check out www.solvio.org for the grander vision. Sorry for all the links and let's change the world!

</comment><comment><USER2> It's confusing or doesn't work at all. You need to add a demo. Maybe a short video.</comment>


Ask HN: What external displays do you guys use? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys - I'm looking at buying a monitor, primarily for coding purposes. I am looking for a monitor around 27" with a relatively high resolution, and good picture quality. I was primarily considering the Apple Cinema Display and the Dell UltraSharp U2711.<p>What do you guys use as external monitors? I'm trying to see if I've missed some good options. <comment><USER2> Personally I like more smaller screens. On my workstation I am currently running 6 24" FullHD monitors. (Mostly because I can, but also _very_ handy for programming)

</comment><comment><USER3> No frill IPS monitor from Monoprice: [http://www.monoprice.com/Product?p_id=10509](http://www.monoprice.com/Product?p_id=10509)

<comment><USER4> Have you used one personally? Any idea if it's significantly worse than the Dell UltraSharp? I've been eyeing 27" monitors recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I own a DELL U2312HM 23" IPS monitor. But i didn't recommend that if you don't like bright display, even on low settings, screen was too bright

</comment><comment><USER6> I have one of the Korean 27" IPS monitors. It works well and the money saved was well worth the slight imperfections it came with.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's always the Asus PQ321Q (3840x2160 32"). Make sure your graphics card supports DisplayPort 1.2 MST though.

</comment><comment><USER8> At work my second display is a 27" iMac. It is connected to my other 27" iMac via thunderbolt.

</comment><comment><USER9> i Own a YAMAKASI CATLEAP Q270 SE 27" LED 2560X1440 PLus another smaller 22inch HP screen.

The CATLEAP is exceptional for its price. 1/3 of the Dell Utrasharp Price !

</comment><comment><USER10> The asus mb168b+ for a portable usb monitor for traveling.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys! Plenty here to research.</comment>


2019 State of Salaries Report - <AUTHOR> http://www.hired.com/page/state-of-salaries <comment><USER2> Is this base salary or total compensation?

<comment><USER3> My guess is either total comp, or hired.com metrics are biased towards the top 10% of candidates / shops.

</comment></comment><comment> slushy-chivalry Always fun to see a demand for developers with >10 years of experience in Golang and TypeScript which exist for <9 and <7 years respectively.</comment>


Canada says Facebook broke privacy laws and 'refused to act responsibly' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/25/facebook-privacy-rules-broken-canada-watchdog-claims <comment><USER2> The press release from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada:

[https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-news/news-and- announcements/20...](https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-news/news-and- announcements/2019/nr-c_190425/)

<comment><USER3> I appreciate this, but I'm having trouble determining if the declaration has teeth or not.

"The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada plans to take the matter to Federal Court to seek an order to force the company to correct its privacy practices.

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for B.C. reserves its right under the Personal Information Protection Act to consider future actions against Facebook"</comment></comment>


The incredibly frustrating reason there's no Lyme disease vaccine - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lyme-disease-vaccine-history-effectiveness <comment><USER2> Lyme disease is rampant in Silicon Valley wherever the deer are. And the deer ticks (vector) are very small.

[https://www.sccgov.org/sites/vector/resources/disease- contro...](https://www.sccgov.org/sites/vector/resources/disease- control/Pages/lyme.aspx)

[https://patch.com/california/losgatos/the-truth-about- ticks-...](https://patch.com/california/losgatos/the-truth-about-ticks-and- lyme-disease-in-santa-clara-county_bcc2ac4c)

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/02/19/stanford-study- finds-...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/02/19/stanford-study-finds-lyme- disease-widespread-in-bay-area-open-spaces/)

<comment><USER3> Crap. #1 on the hit parade, Fremont Older, I used to hike most Mondays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Glad to know that a vaccine was pulled out of market due to safety concerns...Another one that followed the same was the Rotavirus Vaccine [1], even after it was found "safe" during trials.

1\. [https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a5.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a5.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> Does the dog vaccine work on humans?

<comment><USER2> It's not approved for human use. A human taking it would be gambling with their health.</comment></comment>


Summary: Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann - <AUTHOR> https://hoanhan101.github.io/2020/07/05/design-data-intensive-apps <comment><USER2> Recently going through this book. I highly recommend it, and any videos by the author, Martin Kleppmann

I especially like this one:

> CRDTs and the quest for distributed consistency

[https://youtu.be/B5NULPSiOGw](https://youtu.be/B5NULPSiOGw)</comment>


Rockd: Learn, explore, and document your geologic world - <AUTHOR> https://rockd.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Background: "UW-Madison geoscientist offers free geologic exploration app" [http://news.wisc.edu/uw-madison-geoscientist-offers-free- geo...](http://news.wisc.edu/uw-madison-geoscientist-offers-free-geologic- exploration-app/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a really great idea! It happens to be really useful to me right now, as I'm in Hawaii (big island, Hawai'i) and study things very much related to rock composition and age.

There is so much history one can observe driving almost anywhere on this island, and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is nearby for even more fun with "rock" stuff. Kilauea is burbling new material all the time, too.

I've been thinking about doing something similar for classifying flora via morphological analysis (lots of yes/no questions after selecting a best guess of one of the larger groups, eventually getting closer w/ pictures, narrowing to very specific detail question about patterns, arrangement, inflorescence, etc...

So far I've just been polling people who study plants or are involved in conservation/reforestation. I haven't thought of a satisfactory way to do tentative ID's that are "close enough". Close enough to go home, grab a textbook, and confirm as well as possible. That can be difficult here, even for experienced professionals; there are so many plants that are not well- known, so many rare species, so many "misbehaving" plants, and so on.

Ideally, it would have the ability to analyze samples via the camera by comparing to a corpus of known good species pictures. I don't have a clue how to do that, though. Train algorithms, machine learning, etc, etc... If I was sure it would work, I d do it. Otherwise it's much easier to just ask a couple of knowledgeable people.

I think it needs a collaborative effort, something kind of similar to what I see on Rockd... It would be fantastic if people could post, share, and consult with each other.

I will give this app a test drive on my next field work day. Thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if this is intentional or not, but on your web interface I can't select any of the text. I wanted to Google the geological terms but couldn't without typing it out manually.

</comment><comment><USER4> A couple of observations:

1\. If I try to sign in using Facebook, typing in my username, does not result in anything appearing in the text box. When I try to enter it in anyway, assuming it is being entered but not displayed, it shows me that the username has not been entered.

2\. The opening screen tells me to swipe left, but it shows me the next screen only when I swipe right.

I am using a Huawei Honor 5x.

</comment><comment><USER5> Would be great to use this with in flight wifi and see what kinds of geology you're flying over. Cool :)

<comment><USER6> I actually had an app a while ago with this feature, specifically designed for flying or driving long distances. It let you save maps in advance for offline use and had Wikipedia links built in. I wish I remembered the name!

Edit: it's Flyover Country. [https://appsto.re/us/bDjl_.i](https://appsto.re/us/bDjl_.i)</comment></comment>


Goodbye Aberration: Physicist Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical Problem - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2019/07/05/goodbye-aberration-physicist-solves-2000-year-old-optical-problem/ <comment><USER3> There are various people speculating on the _economic_ significance of this solution, which, to me, is rather missing the point. It's like measuring the significance of the excavation of Tutankhamen's† tomb by the tourist revenues of museums. The point of economics is that it keeps us alive so we can do math and also think in other ways; the point of consciousness is not to make money.

I don't think there is any economic significance. They found a closed-form formula, not a manufacturing process. They verified that it produces numerically correct results to 12 significant figures, but typical lens grinding is only accurate to about 100 nm; if your lens is 10 mm thick, that's an error in the 5th significant figure of any coordinate. Calculating a _numerical_ solution to the Wasserman–Wolf problem to 5 significant figures is straightforward, and you could probably do it by hand if you didn't have a computer (although that _would_ involve significant economic cost). In fact, it's not that hard to calculate it to 14 significant figures. The achievement is finding a closed-form solution rather than an iterative numerical approximation.

† Or Tutankhaten, as we used to call him.

<comment><USER4> > The point of economics is that it keeps us alive so we can do math

The most hacker news comment I read all year

<comment><USER3> I notice you don't seem to have dared to say you disagree — would you say that the point of consciousness _is_ to make money?

<comment><USER5> There's more to life than either math or money, haha. I think a lot of people might fit something in there about friends, family, or community. Spiritual growth maybe?

There's options.

<comment><USER3> I venture to say that spiritual growth is part of consciousness — that is, it's "math and thinking in other ways", which is of course what I said above, not "math".

As for friends, family, and community, what is it that gives friendship value, if not your conscious experience of the friendship, and your friend's? Could you coherently call something a good friendship if neither friend enjoys it or improves their thinking from it? The same questions generalize to family and community, though in more complex ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González recalls, "I > remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when > suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!"

> He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he > executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the > place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread.

This is my favorite quote from the article. Soon to be the most famous slice of Nutella bread?

<comment><USER7> This raises the perennial question of whether product placement is a legitimate source of funding for fundamental scientific research.

 _After placing an ice-cube in my delicious glass of refreshing coca-cola brand carbonated beverage, I yelled Eureka! and jumped out of the bath._

Is that _really_ how it happened? Is it not inconsistent with the pursuit of truth?

<comment><USER8> It's really natural, on first mention, to refer to something using a member of the degenerate set of its most unique identifier, right? From that point on, to avoid repetition, mix in antecedents or generic names.

Brands exploit this mechanic in language so that any time a, thereto unknown, good has to be addressed, that identification become advertising. It shifts from being a unique identification of an object/item/thing to a conjuring of the ethos/identity that contextualizes that good as being different from all the others (un)like it.

I'm sure the dude was just having some hazelnut spread and that's how they recalls it but us, like them, are getting hacked. Now if you'll excuse me, the rey--, I mean tinfoil, is starting to get itchy, I need to switch it out.

<comment><USER9> Hazelnut spread is one of those things that is much more commonly referred to as the brand name. No one says "Reynolds wrap" they say "aluminum foil".

No one says "hazelnut spread", they say Nutella.

No one says "resealable sandwich bags", they say ziploc bags.

<comment><USER10> Nutella though is a sugar-and-palm/vegetable-oil spread, which - <USER2> accidentally - contains traces of hazelnuts, powdered milk and cocoa.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand the downvoting of the parent here, which is factually correct and worth noting. It's incredibly unhealthy and this is just down to marketing that anybody eats it. You can make really nice chocolate spreads with your own hazelnuts

<comment><USER12> The needlessly bad-faith "probably accidentally" is factually inaccurate.

<comment><USER10> Just to clarify: it wasn't bad-faith, I was just (trying to be) sarcastic, as most of the store-bought food nowadays "may contain traces of nuts and/or eggs and/or celery" etc.

<comment><USER11> Aha, do note that sarcasm mostly goes down badly on hn, because literal people, and jokes historically frowned upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The paper is from Nov 2018, and is easy to find online. It's a pretty amazing result; the examples they give in the paper are for some reasonable shaped primary surfaces and some really neat "exotic" stuff. The solution actually admits aberrant free solutions for any geometry that doesn't include self- crossing rays. So, some of the 'weird' examples include a Bessel-function cross section, negative index of refraction, and lenses that focus at negative infinity.

The author's have a paper from March 2019 (in arXiv) that uses the result to build some novel telescope geometries.

<comment><USER14> [0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03792](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03792) "Rigorous analytical formula for freeform singlet lens design free of spherical aberration"

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11129](https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11129) "Single lens telescope"

<comment><USER15> Hmmm..... I have a 1/3rd hand-ground telescope mirror lying around... maybe I should see if I can apply some principles here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure I really follow how this actually will result in better lenses. Is the precision of the numerical solution really the problem, or is the problem the actual precise manufacturing of the lens elements?

I have a strong suspicion that the numerical solution is as precise as needed and the limiting factor is the manufacturing, but I would be interested to hear how this results in something new.

<comment><USER17> Your suspicion is justified. The news here is the discovery of an analytical formula - which is "precise," sure, but whether using it directly in an actual computation could yield a more accurate and practically useful result is a good question, due to the complexity of the formula.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slightly related: One thing I've learnt in Physics is that there are still a huge number of practical and fundamental problems to be solved. You might expect everything easy will already be done by now but that's just not true. Hence we still manage to write so many papers! In fact many Physicists have too many papers they want to write and not enough time to write them. This was a huge surprise for me coming in to my PhD. I had naively assumed that physicists were all scrounging for any morsel of content to publish!!

Of course it depends on the field. It's a requirement here in the UK to publish a paper to get your PhD (at least I've been led to believe that), and many particle physics students really struggle to manage to fulfill this. On the other hand gravitational wave detectors have a huge amount of unexplored science as there are so many things that we still do not fully understand about the detectors themselves.

<comment><USER19> I agree with this big time. One of my favorite Feynman quotes is that science is an "expanding frontier of ignorance". There is always somewhere to go and something on the other side, that may change everything and invalidate deeply held convictions forever, all it takes is the guts to, again quoting Feynman, "be willing to stick your neck out".

<comment><USER20> Oh, I'm sure there are lots of things to discover, but I think this underestimates what it takes to actually know enough to find the frontier and decide on a good problem to solve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To clarify: the innovation isn't that they design better lenses. It's that given the first surface of a lens, they have an _analytical formula_ for the lens's second surface so that the lens doesn't exhibit spherical aberration. Traditionally, numerical methods are used to compute this second surface instead of an analytical formula. Also, as a practical matter, designers often use several spherical lenses instead of a few aspherics because the latter are harder to manufacture/more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a seriously awesome piece of work. The mathematics in the paper are pretty dense but if you're ok with vector calculus its not too bad.

The implication here is that you can build lenses that have a consistent focal plane across their entire surface. A pair of glasses made this way would have crystal clear vision regardless of your 'look' direction (as an example). It also suggests that you could build lenses for lasers that were much more consistent, so a laser projector could project an in focus image from edge to edge rather than "fuzzing out" at the corners.

If there is a top prize in optics these guys clearly deserve it.

<comment><USER23> Is this the kind of thing that will have an effect on optics in ray tracers?

"Real world" simulation optics I'm meaning (eg for material design/prototyping), more than gamer oriented. ;)

<comment><USER24> Expect to see an implementation included in subsequent releases of Code V and Zemax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's an interesting mathematical result, but note that gives a solution for the problem of the spherical aberration, but real lens have also chromatic aberration. I.E. the speed of light for each color inside the glass is slightly different, so the value n (refraction index) in the equation is different, so in the equation you get a different surface for each color. In the real lens you must pick one surface, so the effect is that one color is perfectly focused and the other colors are not focused and you get some rainbow-like effects.

The solution is to use combination of a few lens of different glasses, to compensate the differences. It's not easy to design these kind of system, because they must compensante also for other types of aberrations.

More details:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration)

[https://kenrockwell.com/tech/lenstech.htm](https://kenrockwell.com/tech/lenstech.htm)

<comment><USER26> wouldn't this be simply stacking SA free lenses, with the remaining aberrations being alignment related?

<comment><USER25> It is SA free only for one color, not for every color.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fulltext: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328536020_General_f...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328536020_General_formula_for_bi- aspheric_singlet_lens_design_free_of_spherical_aberration/download)

<comment><USER28> And to anyone who is averse to reading dense, long papers: it's only 4 pages long, and a quarter is pictures. It's heavy on the maths, because of course it has to be, but there isn't a single integral in the entire thing. It's remarkably accessible to anyone who took an introductory calculus course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The article talks about the corners of an image being less sharp than the center. That's not spherical aberration; that's off-axis aberration. Spherical aberration causes the image to be less sharp at larger apertures.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this result helps indirectly with off-axis aberration, though — a closed-form solution to the spherical aberration problem may make it easier to optimize for lens shapes that minimize other aberrations.

<comment><USER30> What's your background? In the photography field this is known as spherical aberration indeed: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_aberration](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_aberration)

<comment><USER29> Physics, but not optics. Also, I read and understood the paper. The Wikipedia link seems to agree with me too. Look at the diagram there, and compare it to the diagram for coma [0].

Spherical aberration causes the single point in the center of the object to focus to a different place depending on where the ray hits the lens. This means that the image _of that single point_ is not fully sharp. If you restrict what parts of the lens can be hit by rays from that point (by closing the iris, for example), you reduce the area in the focal plane that the rays hit.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(optics)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_\(optics\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This was extremely well written. Not being a photographer myself, the mathematical discussion and subsequent impact to optics/photography are very accessible. Kudos to the author!

</comment><comment><USER32> > In this equation we describe how the shape of the second aspherical surface > of the given lens should be given a first surface, which is provided by the > user, _as well as the object-image distance_ [...] (emphasis mine)

I didn't check out the paper in detail, sounds like the shape of the correction surface depends on the distance to what you're imaging? Does it do so in a non-trivial way? If so, this sounds a bit more like an academic victory, no?

<comment><USER33> So it's useful if distance to your object changes predictably enough, like in astronomy, satellite imaging and many other kinds of space missions.

<comment><USER32> Well in astronomy you usually want your telescope to be able to observe different targets. So it depends on the details of how the correction surface has to change when the image-object distance.

If it's just a mild deformation and offset, then yeah I guess technology similar to adaptive mirrors could work well.

<comment><USER34> Distances are usually treated as infinity, at least in astrophotography. I'd be surprised if this secondary lens was able to distinguish between light coming from 1ly and 1000ly

<comment><USER32> Doh, of course. Not sure what I was thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does this mean there's hope for those of who had mild vertical diplopia (double vision) before and after lasik surgery? [http://lee2see.com/double- vision-vs-ghosty-image/](http://lee2see.com/double-vision-vs-ghosty-image/)

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm questioning my sense of humor because everyone here seemed to have enjoyed the tone of the article, while I was quite put off by it.

<comment><USER37> It's a good article if you enjoy jokes and references about photographers and how they behave. It's not a good article if you want a minimum of fluff and just want to understand what the discovery is and why it might be significant.

<comment><USER36> I usually enjoy jokes intermingled with info, those didn't hit the right note for me, for some reason.

<comment><USER38> Not every person finds every joke to be funny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hopefully this will increase the sweet spot in the VR headsets.

<comment><USER40> VR headset lens already require software chromatic abberration correction -- I'm curious what constraints if any would limit the application of this new result for VR spherical aberrations. Would love some thoughts from an optics expert on this. I also wonder if this new knowledge could contribute to a software corrector.

<comment><USER41> Hopefully it leads to software-based spherical aberration correction too, which may mean better perceived quality with the same lenses, or even thinner/cheaper lenses over time.

Or maybe they'll find a way to apply it to make better lenses that need less software-based corrections. They struggle a lot not just with clarity at the edges but god rays and glare too.

<comment><USER41> Not an optical expert, just also interested in optics for VR/AR :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Doubtful that this paper is the first analytic solution. There's a light artist who exhibited lenses like this at NYC's Museum of Math several years ago. They turned flashlight beams into pictures. At the artist's talk he passed around a wavy lens and mentioned that one of the surfaces was solved in closed form. Looked like second-to-bottom lens on the page [http://zintaglio.com/lens.html](http://zintaglio.com/lens.html)

<comment><USER43> I voted for your comment because it's interesting but I don't agree that the example you linked is the same problem as solved in this post. But that is an opinion because I'm not informed enough to know for sure. Meanwhile I did dig up a paper related to mapping radiance with a shaped lens like the artist you linked. It's a cool topic! [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.03076.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.03076.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wish there was a bit of insight into his mental process as he realised the solution.

Like the description of Einstein sitting watching a clock and imagining what it would be like to move towards it as a ray of light

</comment><comment> chroem- Will this have any implications for astronomy?

<comment><USER45> From another comment in this thread:

"The author's have a paper from March 2019 (in arXiv) that uses the result to build some novel telescope geometries."

<comment><USER46> Note that "build" doesn't mean they built a physical telescope, they came up with lense shapes.

There are some serious problems when building large telescope lenses; if they get too heavy, they start to deform under their own weight, and non-spherical shapes are hard and expensive to produce.

It would be awesome if this analytical solution inspired improvement in real applications, but I'm cautions about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Brilliant!

Two thoughts:

1) The size of the equation is rather large. Nature tends to like simple equations, I wonder if this equation could be restated in a simpler format and not lose its efficacy. I also wonder if there are still simpler versions that trade off efficacy for degrees of error.

2) If the equation cannot be reduced, then this equation bears looking at from an information preservation perspective, that is, to people who study how the universe preserves information under various conditions, this is one of the equations they should add to their list of equations to study...

But, overall a brilliant, laudable, commendable work with great applications and benefit to society!

Well done!

</comment><comment><USER48> What wenT unsaid wasn't anything about expensive camera gear, but that phone thingy we hold in our pocket. THAT device will get much better at photography in very quick order, and the price change will be largely immaterial.

I fully believe this will be the death of all but professional cameras in 5 years or less. (Yes, I know cameras are already in sharp decline, but I'm talking true death - bankruptcies and firms leaving the market).

<comment><USER49> _I fully believe_

Why? What makes you think this will be easier to implement than existing methods?

<comment><USER48> Gut feel. To me, photography is now a software game. If you can put a reasonably cheap lens in front of a sensor and apply enough computing horsepower, I believe that the old one lens and one sensor will be like the mainframe of cameras. They will still be around, but smaller, modular ones put together via software will dominate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale The fact that there is an analytical solution to the problem is a really nice achievement, but I have to wonder: solving this problem numerically has surely been within reach of computers for a long time, and should therefore have made actually manufacturing such lenses somewhat straightforward.

What am i missing?

<comment><USER50> CAD modeling is very slow when you need to use numerical simulation.

<comment><USER51> I don't follow.

I assume that if numerically solving for a correcting shape was burdensome you would model an element using a first surface and a 'dummy' second surface that your software just treats as magically correcting. ... then when you are happy with your design, you go ahead and compute the actual shape for that second surface... or similar.

I would expect a closed form solution to more useful for meta analysis of the problem-- looking at its behaviors (and especially derivatives) in various external cases may suggest interesting and novel optical system designs. Like, "oh, foo changes cubically with with an infinite focal length that means if we could make lenses with cherry flavored unobtanium we could bounce a gravitation particle beam off the main deflector dish!".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> [https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2019/07/formula.gif](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2019/07/formula.gif)

definitely generated by mathematica

</comment><comment><USER28> "It is unclear whether he finished eating the Nutella bread."

This article is alright.

<comment><USER53> Trying to figure out what voice you're writing that in.

I hope you mean _alright_ alright, and not just _alright_ because I loved that line!

<comment><USER54> I read it as "This article is 'alright alright alright'".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Unrelated, but seems like optics use a different Arxiv format than ML papers, which are always double column.

</comment><comment><USER56> Nobel-price worthy, you think? But perhaps only if they manage to derive a more beautiful formula...

</comment><comment><USER57> Man, that is a long formula! Not something that would pop into my head while spreading nutella.

</comment><comment><USER58> Looking at the picture... does this mean we'll all be using mustache-shaped lenses someday?

</comment><comment><USER59> Awesome article, wild equation

<comment><USER60> Don't such things always seem a bit obvious in retrospect?

/joke

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I would love/hate to read the LaTex that generated that equation.

</comment><comment><USER62> Does it solve chromatic aberration, or just spherical aberration?

<comment><USER46> Just spherical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is the resulting lens rotationally symmetric?

<comment><USER63> The formula computes ZbRa; z axis vs radius. So yes, I believe this is symmetric around the center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Hopefully video game makers will now finally stop putting that stupid chromatic aberration effect in their games.

</comment><comment><USER65> Proud to see it was solved using Mathematica :)

</comment><comment><USER66> G Mga

</comment><comment><USER54> 12 nines? Yawn. Let me know when they get to 15. j/k

That's some serious precision. I wonder if this would have been possible to calculate on a Pentium?[0] After last week, cloud service providers would be happy for 3 nines.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug)

</comment><comment><USER67> I have not checked the actual paper, but according to the article itself:

> Moreover, the solution involved _aspherical elements_ , which are harder to > manufacture in a precise way and are thus more costly.

> Their findings were published in the article General Formula for _Bi- > Aspheric Singlet Lens Design_ Free of Spherical Aberration, in the journal > Applied Optics.

I'm no expert in optics, but that does not sound like the kind of advancement that cheapens lenses, even if the math work is mathematically relevant

<comment><USER28> It also doesn't sound like the kind of advancement that makes camera lenses play mp3 files, but then: neither of those two things are even remotely relevant to the article?

These people solved optical abberation. Even if their work leads to lenses that are twice as expensive as they are today, people whose research, or jobs, rely on perfect optics will be more than happy to pay what it costs to work with those.

Anyone else can wait until one or more companies figures out how to make the manufacturing process cost effective at scale.

<comment><USER68> Currently abberation is dealt with by including multiple lenses. Even if the lens costs twice as much, it's still a wine from a price point.

But yes, only for applications that care about abberation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I laughed when they tried to translate _" Madres!"_, but a pissed off Latina mother running at you waving her sandal in the air like a medieval warrior swinging a truncheon is definitely an _" Oh shit"_ moment.

<comment> david-gpu My understanding is that centuries ago in Latin America "madre" became an euphemism for "madame of a brothel", while actual moms are called "mamá". In Spain it carries no such connotation.

<comment><USER69> Mamá means mom, madre means mother. You use either depending on the context. (I'm only talking about the Mexican use)

Madre is used more often in phrases, such as _" Madre de dios!"_, Or _" La madre putria,"_ or _" Pinche tu madre"_, or it's used as a formal to refer to one's mother. It's similar in English, such as _" On my mother's side"_, _" Mother fucker"_, _" Mother of God!"_, etc.

In Mexico, _" tu madre"_ can be a general insult, probably shortened from _" pinche tu madre"_, though in English we have a similar vulgar retort of _" your mother"_. As a weird turn on the phrase, _" de puta madre"_ is slang for a good thing.

I'm not aware of an association with brothels in Mexico, but certainly in some Latin American country it could have.

<comment><USER70> In México the word "Madrota" does carry that "madame of a brothel" connotation</comment></comment></comment></comment>